Anna > Anna's Quotes

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from "capsizing"! Let us then continue our voyage—each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun—what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche / فریدریش ویلهلم نیچه

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. [...] A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

“Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In music the passions enjoy themselves.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Время, которое мы имеем, - это деньги, которых мы не имеем.”
― Ilia Ilf, The Twelve Chairs

“- Кто, по-вашему, этот мощный старик? Это - гигант мысли, отец русской демократии и особа, приближенная к императору.”
― Ilia Ilf, The Twelve Chairs

“If you should attempt to maintain that film is an art in conversation with a cultured, intelligent American, he'll just plain stop talking to you.”
― Ilya Ilf, Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers

“So what was in this building before historical materialism?'

'Before what?'

'You know, back then, under the old regime?'

'Oh. Under the old regime my master lived here.'

'A bourgeois?'

'You're a bourgeois yourself! He wasn't a bourgeois. He was a marshal of the nobility.'

'So he was a proletarian, then?'

'You're a proletarian yourself! I told you loud and clear, a marshal.'

The conversation with the clever dvornik with a vague understanding of the class structure of society would have lasted god knows how long if the young man hadn't made a decisive move.”
― Ilya Ilf, The Twelve Chairs

“Ippolit Matveevich turned even redder, pulled out a tiny notebook, and wrote in a calligraphic hand:

25/4/1927 — rubles issued to Comrade Bender — 8.

Ostap took a look inside the little book.

'Oh-ho! If you've gone ahead and opened a personal account for me, then the least you could do is tally it right. Start up a debit column, start up a credit column. Don't forget to enter the sixty thousand rubles you owe me in the debits, and the vest can go in the credits. The balance is in my favor: 59,992 rubles.”
― Ilya Ilf, The Twelve Chairs